


Again

by editoress



Category: Lost Song
Genre: F/F, F/M, Sad, rated for suicidal thoughts, then lighter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 21:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16626932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/editoress/pseuds/editoress
Summary: Learn to try again.  Finis in despair and then learning to live another life.





	1. Chapter 1

The world never stops trying again.  That is the nature of life, to pick up the pieces and start building anew.  Finis should follow that example, but she doesn’t know how.

* * *

At first, she is empty.  Now that the world is silent, its enormity strikes her, and she realizes by degrees that she had very little.  Finis was only ever a tangle of love and fear.  She did her best to outshine her terror with joy and compassion.

To be a flower! she thought once.  To bring such happiness while knowing only sunlight and rain!

But every time she sang, reminders of her own mortality spattered wetly on her hands.  And worse was the thought of losing—

That was where the fear and love knotted together, fraying and indistinguishable.  Now there’s nothing holding her together.  She has nothing to fear because there is nothing left.  And whenever she dares to look inside herself, all she sees is the fire from her own lips consuming  _him_.

For the first time in years, no one is watching her for a reaction.  Still, the only reason Finis puts a hand to her mouth is because she thinks maybe that’s what she should be doing.  She tries to cry because maybe acting like a person will bring back any kind of feeling.  She tries to cry and it just feels like ash.

* * *

Something about the way she sang the Song of Mortality was wrong.  Perhaps mortality itself is not a force one woman can wield, not something one can borrow a piece of like fire or earth.  It’s as if the spirits said: Fine.  You want to master mortality?  Take a good look.

* * *

After thousands of years, she sees him in a fishing village.  She simply turns a corner and he’s there, smiling like the sun with long wooden planks set over one shoulder.  He’s being trailed by a couple of barefoot boys who are both trying to tell him something at once.  It’s just the same delighted elder-brother look he always had around children.

That smile, the steady gait, the kind patience—after thousands of years of feeling nothing, they are a physical blow.  The breath is knocked out of her, and as it leaves it forms the name, “ _Henry_.”

He looks up, startled, with his perfect, clear blue eyes.  Something awful wells up in her throat, the pain of waking that which has been suffocated for an age.  Her heart is straining with hope.

But the confusion in his gaze lasts too long.  When he smiles again, it’s with the blank friendliness he would offer anyone else.  And that is like a knife, too, as if someone had sliced into a limb just as it regained feeling.

He’s no one.  He’s a stranger.

* * *

By the time the world begins to look familiar again, Finis has been a ghost for far, far longer than she was ever alive.

* * *

Henry is a doctor this time.  He is unassumingly handsome in his waistcoat and rolled up sleeves, but there are always weary shadows under his eyes.  Finis suffers for days before she speaks to him.  She’s not sure she can survive him staring at her without recognition when just hearing his voice makes her eyes water.

“My father was in the military,” he explains one afternoon, “but I’ve always thought I would rather help people than hurt them.”

“It suits you better,” she manages.

His face opens up in concern.  “Are you all right?”

“Just remembering someone.”  She was thinking: if my Henry was allowed to choose, how much happier would he have been?

“I’m sorry.”

She meets his eyes.  He is leaning casually forward, elbows braced on his knees.  His brows are drawn up in worry—professional worry.  There is an angle to his shoulders and a thinness to his arms she doesn’t recognize.  And when he smiles, it’s not the same.  This is not the same.

* * *

The world cycles.  People are born again and again.  Finis keeps trying.

* * *

This time he holds open a door to a restaurant.  He’s flushed, and his friends are waiting for him inside.

He’s so young, she realizes.  And yet he is the same age as her Henry was when they met.  Her discomfort twists into fear.  Will he always seem so young to her now?  Finis is eternal.  The years are pulling her further and further from the point when her fingers last entwined with his.

* * *

She wants to believe that something happened to Corte that night.  Prince Rudo was too collected and cruel.  Besides, surely if Corte had been alive, nothing would have stopped her from coming to Finis’s side.  Surely Corte was already dead by the time the sun rose.  It’s a horrible thought that should bring guilt with it, but the alternative is worse.

It is very possible that in her grief over Henry, Finis killed Corte herself, as if her sensible, loyal friend were only an afterthought.

Perhaps that is why whenever Corte’s face appears in a crowd, Finis cannot bring herself to look at her.

* * *

She sees the prince, too.  She wants to hate him, enough to stir something in her.  Even fearing him would be enough, but it’s impossible.  All she can think is: at least I will see him die again.  But that only makes her distantly envious, so she ceases to think of him at all.

* * *

Finis cannot undo what she has done.  She has known that since her mind came back to itself in the ruins of the capital.  Singing that song broke something, just as hurting Henry broke her.  The only thing left to do is go forward—finish what she started.

If she could find hope, she would never do it.  For mortal ages she didn’t even think of finishing the song, not when she could find  _her_  Henry in the next town, the next continent, the next century.

He’s never there.  They’re mirages, all of them.  No different from the distant, flickering flame she mistook for his hair when she was still dazed and half mad from her own violence.  They are cruel jokes, and she is too wounded from them to keep playing.

This has to stop.  All of it has to  _stop_.

* * *

Once, she finds him when she wasn’t expecting to.  It almost surprises her into hope.  She still aches at the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles.

Then a dark-haired beauty takes his arm, and his bearing changes.  He looks down at his lover through his lashes.  His gaze is serious and attentive, and when he smiles, it is so, so gentle.

Finis chokes.  It’s the first time she has seen his expression match her Henry’s exactly, and he’s not looking at her.

* * *

Truth lurks beneath the surface.  Finis keeps her thoughts away from it, but it’s there all the same.

How could she have expected to find the right Henry when she is no longer the right Finis?

* * *

The time is near.

Finis finds it ironic that as the moon draws inward to its closest point, the world draws nearer to the one she came from.  It’s as if everything is converging on a point, like a slow implosion.  Names and borders align with her memory.  The world is full of dirt roads and cobbled streets and songs she almost knows.

Everything is in place.  And she is so tired.

When she stops to rest one night, she knows exactly where she is.  It’s one benefit of wandering the world for so long; it’s hard to get lost anymore.  This cavern was once so magical.  The same stars shine above her, but the space is cold and empty without him.

Even now, part of her catches at the sight of the Leobolt crest.  She wants to see his face one more time, even if it breaks her heart.  Her heart—her heart has survived long past its years.  For thousands of years it has gasped and writhed like a wounded animal, but it still troubles her.  No matter how much despair she endures, it just won’t  _go_.

So she sings, soft, warm, and comforting.  She sings everything that’s missing into the air of that lonely place.  She draws it out—and leaves it unfinished.  It drifts away, vibrating uselessly on the wind.  Her chest grows cold and silent, just how she wanted it.

Finally.

Everything that might stop her is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

And then, miraculously, it’s back.

The world is bright.  The air is cool on her wet cheeks.  Her chest hurts.  She cries like she has not cried since what feels like the beginning of time.  And when she looks up, she is not alone.

The first princess of Golt is there.  Tears stream down her face despite the fact she keeps scrubbing them away with a sleeve.  A boy clings to the front of her shirt and weeps in her arms.  Finis is drawn to them without understanding why.  Overwhelmed, she thinks: that boy—I love him.  I don’t even know his name.

Finis stumbles to her feet with the strangest sensation.  She feels, suddenly, that the ground under her is more solid than she is, and that the ocean is older, and that she is very small.

Is this what being mortal was like all along?

* * *

In the end, they do not execute her.

Finis makes her peace with that.  Her body is subject to time again; she can feel it in every thudding heartbeat.  What’s a few more decades?

* * *

In fact, they insist she be guarded.

The princess—the queen—announces it with a casual wave, but Finis has seen the woman’s sidelong glances.  Alea loved that girl.  Whether she suspects that something of her lives on in Finis or just respects her last wishes, there is no telling.  But either way Finis will be protected.

Corte is assigned as her personal guard, at which Finis is… ambivalent.  It will be good to be near Corte again, any Corte.  And yet Finis can’t help but think it will be strange to see her fill Henry’s role.

A bodyguard is certainly a far cry from a handmaid.  Corte’s iron will and ramrod posture suit the armor well, though.  The stubborn set of her jaw stands out less than it did on a servant of the castle.  And when she kneels before Finis and makes her vow in a matter-of-fact tone with determination sparking in her eyes, Finis is taken aback.  Because it’s not strange at all.

* * *

Once Finis realizes, with some bewilderment, that she is pregnant, Corte begins watching her like a hawk.  She fusses like never before in the long history of the world; Finis can attest to this.  She allows it because after all this time, there is nothing as warm as never feeling alone.

* * *

She goes to Henry’s wedding.  Of course she does.

It hurts less than she expects.  Perhaps, without realizing it, she has finally reconciled the fact that she cannot bring back what she had.  Finis is too far changed, and she couldn’t start over now even if she wanted to.  That is not her Henry smiling helplessly at Alea.  Alea, trying to smirk past a very real blush, is not taking anything from Finis.  They are two people in love, or possibly driving each other mad.  She smiles softly.

Corte takes her hand.  She’s beaming triumphantly.  “You’re smiling!” she whispers.  A nobleman shushes her, and she glares at him until he turns back around.

Finis’s smile grows brighter; she nearly laughs.  Corte stares at her as though she’s never seen anything so wonderful.

The magistrate is wrapping up the ceremony, but Finis isn’t looking.  She’s thinking:  _oh_.

* * *

The simple truth is that Finis never considered the possibility of kissing Corte.  Now that she has, it’s obvious.

First she kisses Corte on the cheek, like a shy schoolgirl, and slips into her chambers away from a flustered cry of “Miss Finis!”  Corte, she finds, has no trouble giving affection—she begins lifting Finis’s hands to her lips at every opportunity—but receiving it astonishes her.

Well.  They have time to practice.

* * *

It is not until her child is born that Finis understands.

It’s a girl—of course it is.  She breaks it to everyone a few days later.  Corte is holding the baby and making faces at her.  It makes a ridiculous background to a solemn announcement.  

Afterwards, everyone is silent, except the baby.

Al’s mouth presses into a thin line.  In his young, sad voice, he asks, “But she won’t be the same Rin, will she?”

Alea shoots him a sympathetic look, and her hand lands on his head.  “No,” Finis replies quietly, “she won’t.  The exact Rin you knew is never coming back.”  She folds her hands in her lap, unfazed by Alea’s furious scowl.  “But please love her anyway.  She has the same heart.”

Al nods seriously.  “I will.”

* * *

It helps that Rin does not look exactly like the girl who brought back her heart.  Finis’s daughter has lighter hair and paler green eyes.  If she resembles Henry, no one mentions it.  She grows up singing.  Nothing comes of her song; it does not summon any spirits.  She loves it anyway.

* * *

And this is how Finis lives again.  She has a wife who has learned to accept kisses magnanimously and will stay up for hours to talk.  She has a daughter who is surrounded by love on all sides and radiates joy.  And though the love she destroyed so long ago is never forgotten, it can’t taint what she has.

Once in a while she thinks that she should leave the castle.  She has no more song to offer the crown.  Yet she stays year after year.  Nostalgia, she thinks.  Her tower overlooks the gardens and the city below.  Besides, there is something satisfying about keeping her new life where the old one once was.

She wonders aloud with Corte about whether the world will continue to cycle on without her.  She has no idea whether the Song of Mortality caused history to repeat itself or if that is simply the nature of things.  Corte tells her not to worry.  If Finis comes back, Corte will, too.  It’s the most straightforward philosophy toward the concept of eternity that Finis has ever heard, and she likes the sound of it.

This is how Finis learned to begin again.


	3. Chapter 3

Cautiously, Finis pokes her head out of the train.

The station is absolutely  _full_ of noise, and there are people headed in every direction.  She looks down at her train schedule, but it looks like she's got it upside down and has no time to right it.  She's late as it is.  Nodding to herself, she steps out onto the platform.

"Excuse me!  Miss!"

She looks over her shoulder.  "Oh!"

It's the kind young man who had the seat next to her and shared his lunch.  He's terribly handsome, even if right now his hair is a bit tousled.  Maybe she shouldn't have insisted on leaving the window open.  "Miss," he says urgently, "I thought you said you were getting off at Veront Station."

"I am," she replies.  She glances perfunctorily at her perfectly useless train schedule.  "Isn't this Veront Station?"

"No, Miss," he says gravely.  He's not making fun of her at all.  He really is kind.

"Oh."  Finis gets back on the train daintily.  The daintiness is ruined when her skirt catches on the door and she topples forward.

The young man catches her expertly.  She thinks it's impressive, but he looks faintly embarrassed.  "Are you all right?" he asks.

"Yes, I'm just fine."  She smiles to show it's true.  "Are you all right?  I fell on you!"

He laughs a little, and she likes the way he smiles.  "I'm all right.  What if I got off on Veront Station with you?"

"But what about your stop?"

"It's only a couple of miles.  I don't mind.  Just to make sure you don't get lost."

She purses her lips crossly, but it's only for show.  "Oh, you sound just like Corte!"

He gestures her back to their seats.  "Corte?"

"Yes.  I'm meeting her at the station, so you'll have to meet her, too."  Her cheeks turn pink.  "She's just lovely."

He lets her have the window seat again, despite the fact that surely he doesn't want the window open.  "If she's your friend, I'm sure she is."

She turns even pinker.  "My name is Finis."

"I'm glad to meet you, Finis."  He sits down beside her with a bright, sunny smile.  "I'm Henry."


End file.
